healthful

English

Alternative forms

• healthfull (archaic)

Etymology

From Middle English helthful, helþful, helþeful, equivalent to health +‎ -ful.

Adjective

healthful (comparative healthfuller or more healthful, superlative healthfullest or most healthful)

1. Beneficial to bodily health.
   • 1906, Princeton Alumni Weekly (volume 7, page 210)

     Hockey is an exciting and healthful form of exercise, well suited to college students […]

2. Conducive to moral or spiritual prosperity; salutary.
   • 1926, Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Folio Society 2008, p. 30:

     As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.

3. (archaic) Synonym of healthy (“evincing health”)
   • 1835, [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], “The Knight of Provençe, and His Proposal”, in Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes. […], volume I, London: Saunders and Otley, […], →OCLC, book II (The Revolution), page 184:

     His fair hair waved long and freely over a white and unwrinkled forehead: the life of a camp and the suns of Italy had but little embrowned his clear and healthful complexion, which retained much of the bloom of youth.

Usage notes

When a clearer distinction is intended, healthy is used to describe the state of the object, and healthful describes its ability to impart health to the recipient. Vegetables in good condition are both healthy (i.e., not rotten or diseased) and healthful (i.e., they improve the eaters' health, compared to eating junk food). By contrast, a poisonous plant can be healthy, but it is not healthful to eat of.

Synonyms

• healthy
• salubrious
• salutary
• wholesome

Derived terms

• healthfully
• healthfulness

Related terms

• heal
• health
• healthy

Translations

beneficial to health

• Bulgarian: здравословен (bg) (zdravosloven)
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 健康 (zh) (jiànkāng)

• Czech: zdravý (cs)
• Dutch: gezond (nl)
• Finnish: terveellinen (fi)
• French: sain (fr)
• Galician: saudable (gl), san (gl)
• German: gesund (de)
• Greek: υγιεινός (el) (ygieinós)
• Japanese: 健康的な (けんこうてきな, kenkōteki na)
• Latin: sanus (la)
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Latvian: veselīgs
• Lithuanian: sveikas (lt), sveikatingas
• Macedonian: здрав (zdrav)
• Mizo: hrisël
• Polish: zdrowy (pl)
• Portuguese: saudável (pt)
• Russian: здоро́вый (ru) (zdoróvyj), поле́зный (ru) (poléznyj)
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: здра̏в

  Roman: zdrȁv (sh)

• Slovene: zdrav (sl)
• Spanish: saludable (es), sano (es), salutífero (es)